settled somewhere, there are those bedrooms standing empty upstairs and very much on my conscience. But an elderly woman – you did say she was elderly?’
‘Between sixty and seventy, I should say … only … it’s so difficult to judge. Unusually talkative,’ Gerald added, hoping his distaste did not sound in his voice.
‘Barnes – oh, Gladys Barnes . Of course I know Miss Barnes . Yes, she is unusually talkative. I don’t know her well, she’s a rather irregular attendant, has a sister with some mysterious ailment – nervous, I should think – that keeps her bedridden, so our Miss Barnes can’t always get away. Threatened with eviction, eh?’
‘So I … gathered. But it … wasn’t very clear.’
Mr Geddes laughed shortly and observed that he imagined it wasn’t. ‘Did she leave an address?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she did as a matter of fact. Rose Cottage, Rose Walk, N.W.5. I remembered it because … an unexpectedly charming name.’
If Mr Geddes thought this hardly the right reason for remembering a parishioner’s address, he said no more than a dry ‘H’m – it doesn’t look very charming,’ as they went out of the room. Mrs Hemmings, who came in every day allegedly to care for the comforts of the elderly widower and the young bachelor, was hovering, wanting to clear the table.
‘I’ll get along there to-morrow, if I can make time,’ the Vicar promised, as he went into his study. ‘I called there once, when I first came here, I remember now.’
But he was thinking more of how much he disliked poor Mrs Hemmings’s cooking and her sour face. Would it be shockingly selfish to bring his mother down from Harrogate to look after him? She had only been released from the tyranny of many stone-floored, rambling, draughty, mousey vicarages three years ago, and the hotel was warm, pretty and comfortable.
Dammit, he thought suddenly, of course I’ll ask her. Don’t we both know, bless her, that she’s only dying to come?
4
It was well after dusk, the next evening, as he climbed determinedly up the short flight of stairs that led to the Barnes sisters’ rooms.
As usual, he had had a long day; up for the six forty-five; then another service at ten for those too old or frail to attend the earlier service; the tasteless lunch (a minor comfort now, with others oh how unbearably greater, lost to him, had been his wife’s cooking), hospital visiting, perhaps the dreariest task that falls to a parish priest, all the afternoon; then Evensong, read through with the curate in the dim, empty church; and now the visit to Miss Barnes. It was to be followed by the meeting of the Men’s Group, at eight, at the Vicarage.
At the top of the stairs he was confronted by darkness made just less impenetrable by a dim glow falling through a skylight. There was the musical dripping of a tap somewhere. He thought he could make out another flight of stairs, presumably leading to an attic. He was confronted by a shut door, with a dim light shining under it. He tapped.
A gaping child had opened the front door to him and nodded when he said ‘Miss Barnes?’ He had carefully moved aside the chair on which it had climbed to turn the latch, and had distinguished a murmur about ‘Glad’. He had smiled at it – pale, trousered, sticky and apparently hermaphrodite – and realised that, from this moment, he was on his own.
He repeated the tap.
At once came a distant squeak. ‘I’m all right, Jean, I don’t want nothing, Glad’ll be back any minute.’ The tone was full of quite unequivocal rejection. Mr Geddes cleared his throat.
‘It’s the Vicar, Mr Geddes. The Vicar. From Saint James’s Church.’
Stunned silence followed. Then – ‘I’m in bed. Bedridden. Can’t ’ardly move.’
‘I wanted to see the Miss Barnes who comes to Saint James’s,’ he called, feeling the strain on a sixty-year-old throat.
‘I can’t get out of bed. Very weak. It’s my sister you want. She’s just popped